Winds of Change peels back a curtain to expose the steady drumbeat of clichés and sloganeering dotting the media landscape … well, you get the drift;
Every 100 deaths in Iraq is a “grim milestone,” by fiat of the media. It is the most overworked cliché of local journalism since, “Rain couldn’t dampen the spirits/enthusiasm of _____ graduates of _____ high school during last night’s commencement ceremony as they looked to the future and pondered the past.”
It requires no thought or reflection. It treats round numbers as the definition of reality. This has been a media trope since the first shots were fired (“After days of intense searching by ground and air, U.S. forces on Saturday found the bodies of two soldiers missing north of Baghdad, as the toll of American dead since the start of war topped the grim milestone of 200 …” — Associated Press, June 29, 2003). I doubt anyone who wrote any of these headlines could explain to you why death number 3,000 was enormously more significant than death number 2,997. Certainly not to the parents of number 2,997.
Does it help you to know these numbers divorced from context? Are there not many Americans who would consider, say, every 1,000 abortions nationwide a “grim milestone?” Even if you set 1,000 battle deaths (not the AP’s preferred 200) as the benchmark for “grim milestones,” you had a grim milestone every five days during America’s involvement in World War II with nary a “grim milestone” headline to show for it.
“Grim milestone’ is right up there with my favorite, the “senseless killing”.There is one of these reported at least every week, so when do we get to hear about the killing s that make sense?
Maybe when our justice system completely fails, and lynch mobs become fashionable?
Re: senseless killing
We should adopt a wait-and-see attitude.
In the meantime, I will be cautiously optimistic.
I always get a kick out of the phrase “his untimely death”. Keep trying to imagine a news story which would contain “timely death”.
But being in the investment business, my very favourite, hands down, is “in these uncertain times” which, at the end of the day, always are.
Me No Dhimmi; I would venture to say that Saddams death would be timely. His sidekicks that had to wait for their turn at stretch the rope were certainly facing uncertain times, not knowing when the knock would happen.
/just sayin
913 Canadians died at Dieppe in 1942.
http://www.vac-acc.gc.ca/remembers/sub.cfm?source=history/secondwar/dieppe/dieppe2/d_casualties
Canada then had an estimated population of 11,654,000.
http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/98-187-XIE/pop.htm
Put another way, roughly:
Over almost four years the US has in total suffered in Iraq one fatality per 100,000 population.
In around one day in 1942 Canada suffered one fatality per 10,000 population.
Ten times the fatality rate for a country in one day as opposed to four years.
Not to diminish any death but to supply some perspective. The war in Iraq may have in the end been carried out ineffectually, but by any reasonable standard it has not been very costly in human lives for the US.
And it is the Iraqis who seem determined to cause intentionally great civilian loss of life to each other.
Mark
Ottawa
If they had the same childish journalists that we do, then the WWII generation would have lost the war.
statistics are always interesting unless you are one.
The msm are afraid of what will happen when these soldiers come home and refuse to be shoved around by the PC. Imagine telling a WWII vet that he/she could not light a cigarette in the legion!